We are so excited to introduce a new member to our ZineCat team. Meet our Metadata Intern,Vita Kurland! They will be helping us to provide support in strategizing the harmonization of zine metadata, writing guidance for current and future contributors to ZineCat, and collaborating on a zine that documents the work.
Bio:
Vita Kurland (they/them) is an archivist, curator, and dress historian. They are completing their MA in Costume Studies at NYU Steinhardt and MLIS at LIU Palmer while working as a Graduate Fellow at Barnard College in the Archives and Special Collections. Kurland’s research focuses on graphic T-shirts, secondhand markets, collecting, and memorial wearables. As an archivist their work is centered around bringing marginalized histories to the forefront of archives and education. They hold their BA in Art and Aesthetics from Bard College Berlin.
Zines in Libraries: Selecting, Purchasing, and Processing has just been published by ALA (American Library Association) with contributions by our very own ZineCat community. The book contains insights from Katrin Abel, Jeremy Brett, Ann (A’misa) Matsushima Chiu, Marta Chudolinska, Jenna Freedman, Joan Jocson-Singh, Mica Johnson, Lauren Kehoe, Joshua Lupkin, Meg Metcalf, and Ziba Perez. Order your copy today!
Many of the authors have also shared their chapters at ZineLibraries.info. The project managers of the Zine Union Catalog have also contributed their knowledge.
Read Jenna Freedman’s “The Barnard Zine Library: The Controlled and the Wild” to learn about the development of the Zine Library at Barnard. It details how this special library and archive came together and includes images of ephemera from the process. Freedman is also sure to give credit to those who have helped her assemble the library along the way and is transparent about what needs improvement or could have been done differently while also sharing future goals for the institution. With humor and grace, this chapter gives a thorough behind-the-scenes view of the Barnard Zine Library.
To learn more about what we do at ZineCat, check out the chapter “The Zine Union Catalog” by Lauren Kehoe. The history and many goals of ZineCat are outlined in this essay. Kehoe expands upon how the catalog works, its beginnings, and its projected impact on the study, research, and dissemination of zines. Acknowledging the inherent tension within cataloging and the work that still needs to be done, the chapter ends with an open call. Please feel free to reach out to us at zinecatproject@gmail.com if you want to get involved, know more about the Zine Union Catalog, or to simply share your thoughts! We deeply appreciate your feedback.
We are starting off the new year with some exciting news. ZineCat is proud to announce the addition of two new collections: Anchor Archive Zine Library and the OCAD U Zine Library. Look out for this new integration soon!
Many thanks to Anchor Archive and OCAD for joining our database!
Please reach out to zinecatproject@gmail.com if you have a zine archive you’d like to share too.
It has been over a year since our last post, so we thought it might be a good time to re-introduce readers to the Zine Union Catalog and our current staff.
We are a union catalog dedicated to zines. A union catalog is a resource where libraries can share cataloging and holdings information. The Zine Union Catalog (ZineCat) allows researchers to discover zine holdings by searching a single catalog and helps librarians copy catalog records to facilitate lending across libraries. ZineCat serves educators, researchers, librarians, archivists, and anyone in the general public with an interest in zines. Our goal is to welcome zine collections around the globe to upload and share their zines.
The Zine Union Catalog was first discussed by zine librarians at the first Zine Librarians unConference held in Seattle in 2009. Read more about the history of the project on the Zine Libraries website.
ZineCat is currently organized by:
Jenna Freedman – Project Co-Manager Contact: zinelibe@gmail.com Bio: Jenna Freedman is a zine maker and zine librarian. She founded and curates the Barnard Zine Library at Barnard College, where she also serves as the Associate Director of Communications and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Librarian. This project culminates her work at the CUNY Graduate Center. A product of public school education, Jenna earned her MLIS at the University of South Florida and her BA in theater at SUNY New Paltz. Jenna’s research and practice are primarily in the field of zine librarianship, a topic on which she writes and speaks frequently.
Lauren Kehoe – Project Co-Manager Contact: @lsrklibrarian Bio: Lauren Kehoe is the Accessibility and Accommodations Librarian at New York University. She received her undergraduate degree in Dramatic Literature from NYU in 2003, her MLIS from Pratt Institute in 2009, and her MA in Digital Humanities from the CUNY Graduate Center in 2020. Lauren is interested in supporting researchers and scholars in the library through proven and new methods of engaging with information.
Eric Goldhagen Freedman – Project Developer Contact: @ericgoldhagen Bio: Eric Goldhagen Freedman is a technologist, media producer, and EMT. After 20 years of managing Openflows Community Technology Cooperative he has recently started to work independently, supporting Non Profit Organizations, NGOs and advocacy groups use of technology. In the 1990s he initiated a project at ABC No Rio, a community-arts center in Manhattan that grew into a free public-access computer center for the neighborhood. Eric also teaches and gives presentations on the history and practice of Open Source/Free Software and software licenses at various conferences and academic institutions.
Jennifer Chen-su Huang – Outreach & Documentation Coordinator Contact: @hepoosclouds Bio: Jennifer Chen-su Huang is an artist and writer whose process-driven works interweave elements of craft tradition, language, history, and memoir. She graduated with her MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and received her BA from the University of California, Berkeley in 2013. Jennifer is currently an editor for the Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of World Textiles and a graduate student at NYU where she is examining textile traditions through the lens of Performance Studies.
This weekend our focus was the public interface, which was pretty much nonexistent on our development platform. Also, as it turns out, the live zinecat is a little dead.
We’re back to ingesting records, as we finally got a good extract from QZAP, thanks to zine librarian Dianne Laguerta, who worked with the data as part of a Code School program. And the records are still giving us/CollectiveAccess indigestion.
Another dated reference, this image is from a 1980s Pepto Bismol commercial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BK0o1HJGVrw
While I did not get much work done this past weekend due to family commitments and lack of motivation because Jenna and I were in different states, I did have an opportunity to use some work time today on data cleaning. At NYU Libraries, where I work by day, there is a Community of Practice group that meets once a month to learn new skills in using OpenRefine, which is a “Java-based power tool that allows you to load data, understand it, clean it up, reconcile it, and augment it with data coming from the web. All from a web browser and the comfort and privacy of your own computer.” I have long suspected that this software would be very useful for ZineCat, so I am very excited that I got the opportunity to work in OpenRefine and also have an opportunity for monthly meetings and check ins as I learn this tool and use it to work on ZineCat.
So we got the go ahead to submit our final paper as a zine for the capstone! Yippee!! We were even told that it would be a wonderful first addition to the MADH program, but were also cautioned to not take on too much work. Zines are a lot of work, but it does make the most sense for our project and furthermore, Jenna and I both like making zines, so it seems like the perfect medium to communicate the accomplishments of our work in grad school on the Zine Union Catalog. If anyone reading this wants to suggest content for the zine, please read this 12 hours / week post that goes into some detail about what we are considering for inclusion in the final capstone zine and comment there…or contact us at zinecatproject@gmail.com
In other update news, Jenna and our Openflows consultant were hard at work over the last week to create, adjust, and readjust the maps for ABC No Rio and Carnegie Library! I should take a moment to acknowledge that our MAP is indeed a map that allows for us to direct the Collective Access system to map metadata from a spreadsheet filled with lots of information about the zine collections into the appropriate fields within the Collective Access system, but it also stands for Metadata Application Profile. It’s also sometimes called a Crosswalk. The DPLA has a bit to say about the MAPs used for their system. Collective Access also provides information for understanding their Data Importer (as CA calls it).
Lauren and I thought repeating the ingests would be super easy. Breaking news: just because it’s easy-ish to map and upload thirty records and limited fields from a catalog does not mean it’s easy to upload 12,401 records that include category and keyword fields, especially when the server processing in the ingest doesn’t have the biggest brain.
I’m a little late on this post (it was supposed to be shared last weekend), but as you can imagine and understand, life and work sometimes get in the way! I’m remembering clearly this very moment our conversation with our two advisors, Lisa and Maura, a month or so ago, where they so kindly reminded us to mitigate our expectations for ourselves and this capstone over the course of the semester! We did some math during that meeting where they helped us think through how many hours each week we were going to spend on the project based on the prospectus we gave them (it was something like 12 hours/week) and I have definitely not had 12 hours this week, or last, to devote to ZineCat. For anyone reading this that works in an academic institution of higher education, you may empathize with my plight, but enough about me being tardy on this (last week’s) blog post…let me fill you in on the update.
